


Brighter than Brass

by orphan_account



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Citadel Dlc spoilers, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-06
Updated: 2013-03-06
Packaged: 2017-12-04 12:10:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/710641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'Never mention this again', huh?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Brighter than Brass

**Author's Note:**

> As much as I appreciate Bioware and their giving in to our Vega demands, I'm not quite happy with 'never mention this again, Commander'.

I.

"I haven't mentioned it," Shepard said. 

It didn't sound like Vega believed her.

* * *

 

II.

 

It might have been Joker's snickering. It could have been the way that Cortez smiled at her in the shuttle bay. Cortez had always been friendly in more than a subordinate way— he was a friendly guy. But she had also heard that Vega suspected something. Maybe they'd been caught in a vid. 

Maybe Jack had come up and gotten a picture while they had still been sleeping. In her brand new bed. 

"Hey, Commander," James said one morning aboard the Normandy, sounding. Shepard didn't want to turn to meet his gaze— she was sure there was an entirely new way to look at a Commander when you had seen her naked. She didn't want to embarrass him, though, that wasn't the point. He wasn't looking to undermine her authority. She was Shepard, after all. 

"Vega," Shepard said. She kept her gaze on her tablet, signing off on the inventory. 

He didn't want to mention it. So she wouldn't. She'd pretend that the night she'd been waiting nearly six months for despite reapers, the genophage and Mordin had never happened. Easy-peasy, right? "You said anything about—," he paused. Shit. "You know." 

Shepard gave him a look. She'd given him that look only once before and it had been in the archives in the Citadel when they were about to suffocate to death and she had been running her lip. It was a look that said, "Really?" 

"I haven't mentioned it," Shepard said. 

It didn't sound like Vega believed her. 

 

III.

 

As much as he didn't want to have to think about it, he did. 

The memory in itself was foggy— he'd consumed roughly half his body weight in pizza and alcohol, but that wasn't the point. 

But there was something funny seriously going on because Cortez and Joker were snickering off somewhere, James was sure of it. 

Vakarian too, that blue bastard was up to something funny and James didn't like it. Not one bit. 

"Hey," James asked Cortez. "What'd you say to the Commander at her party?" 

It sounded like he hit his head on the Kodiak. "Nothin'," came his reply. 

"Bullshit," Vega said. "She hasn't said more then a 'good morning, LT' to me in over a week." 

"Were you that bad?" Cortez asked. 

Vega punched his leg. 

"Ow, okay, I'm sorry," he said. "I haven't said anything to her since the party, scout's honor." 

Next mission they went out on— some rescue run for an outlying planet that hadn't been overrun by reapers yet, Shepard took him and Alenko. 

Alenko was up front with Cortez, leaving him and the Commander to look through Intel on the screen. Standing side by side. Close enough to reach out and grab her hand. 

"I haven't mentioned it," Shepard said. 

Vega didn't believe her. 

  

IV.

Vega was cooking again. 

Only this time it was four o'clock in the morning and they were the only people in the mess hall. Why he was cooking eggs— seriously, eggs, again— at four o'clock in the morning, she did not know. But she'd already done her run in the gym downstairs, she was freshly showered. Her hair was even still wet. 

"Vega," Shepard said. "That looks amazing." 

He didn't look too startled to see her. He was sporting a pulled tendon in his leg; she'd benched him to recover. 

Ah. So that was it, he was going stir-crazy. "Hey, Commander." 

Shepard was served breakfast, which she ate. She was an appropriate amount of space away from Vega. She was safe. Better, even. Shepard was great. 

Just, great. 

"So, Commander," James started. 

Oh, great. 

 

V.

He didn't know how he'd wound up in front of Shepard's cabin at two o'clock in the morning, but he could tell you that his month had not been going  _well_. 

So far he'd approached Shepard about that night at the party with varying degrees of shame and not-success at least seven times. 

Every single freakin' time he'd ask her about it, all he'd get was a 'I haven't mentioned it, Vega' in that stupid little sexy tired voice of hers when she was dealing with something she didn't want to be dealing with. 

Wait, what. 

He really shouldn't be here— though knowing her, she'd be awake, looking at logistics, filling out paperwork, lounging on the couch with her feet on the seat with her back on the floor. 

But it was two o'clock in the morning, and Vega wanted to ask about the party one more time. 

Just once more, because he really couldn't understand what had happened. 

So he pressed the buzzer and tried to swallow the goddamn butterflies that suicide-dived their way into his gut. 

"Lola?" he called. 

There was a moment of silence, then a rustle. A thud of something metallic against the surface of Shepard's table. Then, "Lola, here." 

Tired, but not angry. James took that as a good sign. "It's Jimmy," he said. And then he corrected, "Vega."

"I know it's you, Jimmy." He couldn't tell whether she was laughing at him or with him, but he appreciated the low little hum from the other side of the com. "Something the matter?"

He clicked his heels together. This was where things went south for him— he didn't have a reason to be up here. He wanted to see Shepard. Talk to her, hear her voice. Have a drink. Sit down on her couch and maybe watch some vids. Normal things that weren't both of them bleeding from a battlefield. He wanted to see if the smell he remembered on her skin from the party was anything like the smell of her skin in her civilian clothes. "Nothin', you know. Just wanted to ask you about—"

"I haven't mentioned it, Jimmy," came Shepard's voice. Shit. He'd spat out the wrong thing.

"I— I know." He said.  

There was a click as the door to Shepard’s apartment slid open. He took that as permission to enter, though he didn't really know what to do at that point. He hadn't even brought wine.  _Loco_. 

He went in anyway.

Shepard was more casual than he expected. Her red hair was down and she was in shorts and a reg grey shirt. He had a dozen identical shirts downstairs. She had her tags around her neck. 

She had the distinct look of someone that had been running a hand through her hair for the last hour and a half. James looked down at her feet. She wasn't even wearing socks. 

"Hey, Lola," Jimmy said at the stair. She remained on the couch, with her ankles crossed on the table. 

"Jimmy," she said. Something funny went down his spine. 

They gazed at one another for a moment. He really shouldn't be here, he had no business bein' here. He should go back to his weights and his bunk downstairs in the hold. The Hold was safe; this was the den of a lioness that also paid his salary for his poker habit. 

And yet his feet did not move when he told them too. 

Finally, Shepard gave up with his nervous stare. She rolled her eyes at him and said, "Jimmy, you really shouldn't be here." 

Why was her lack of socks bothering him so much as it was? Lack of socks and shorts, what was happening. 

Wait, what? "Hold up, why's that?" 

Sockless-Shepard looked at him like he had grown a salarian second-head. "Jimmy," she said— again, what was with the shiver? "You've been hounding me with the same question for two weeks." 

He thought back.  _I haven't mentioned it, Jimmy_. 

Manda Huevos. "Slow down, Lola, I ain't here for that." 

Lying to Shepard was like lying to a varren that could smell fear. At least, that was what James thought, when Shepard sent her the 'I-know-what-you're-doing' look. It wasn't a fun look because it always worked on him. Dammit. 

"And since when have you started calling me Jimmy?" James asked, putting a hand on his hip and coming down the stairs to lean against one side of her couch. "Jimmy is a twelve year old covered in dirt that just threw a rock through the Miller's window."

"You don't want me to call you Jimmy?" Shepard asked, looking up from her tablet. "How come you get to give everyone nicknames but we don't get to give you one?'

He hadn't said that. He hadn't said that, had he? He liked when she called him Jimmy. Jimmy was a sleepy purr at two o'clock in the morning when she felt him rustle on the bed. 

And hold on, when did that happen. 

Jimmy was the way that her hip fit perfectly against his back and the way her arm had rested against his chest and her cold feet against the back of his calf. Jimmy was the soft, nearly silent snore of someone that was in so deep a sleep that they did not even care that he was hungover and half passed out right next to them. The sleep of someone that was completely safe. That's what Jimmy was. 

And suddenly James never wanted her to stop calling him Jimmy. 

And, somehow, he had found himself on the couch, not two feet away from where she was. He didn't know if he had been invited, but— she wasn't throwing him across the room, and had just gone back to her tablet. She had even reached over and gotten him a drink out of her mini fridge. 

His heartbeat was trying to burst through his throat, if James was honest— but drinking was probably better than having nothing at all to say. 

But then, "I know," Shepard said. "I'm supposed to have these done by the time we get back from a drop and get our armor off," she paused. "But it's so tedious that I put it off and end up staying awake til four in the morning to finish them." 

James swallowed. "That's probably not the best habit to have, Commander." But then he remembered that morning a few days ago, when it had been just them in the mess hall and he had nearly flipped and dropped the pan. "You tellin' me you didn't sleep at all that one morning?"

Shepard shrugged. As if obviously saving the galaxy didn't require eight hours of snoozin' time a night. 

"I can sleep when I'm dead," Shepard said. 

"You should try to sleep, Lola," James said. "I don't want to have to keep you to that promise."

Shepard looked at him, and dammit if it wasn't the most honest thing he'd ever seen. Comprehension, union with the universe, understanding that, though she joked about it, he was actually afraid that they'd die on this mission. Her green gaze lingered on him, passing over when the moment was done. 

"Why did you come after me," Jimmy asked, "At the party?" 

There it was. The question he wanted to ask but had been stupid enough to mess up over and over again. He wanted to know— without roughly drinking half his weight in alcohol and too smackered to remember even managing to take their clothes off. "I thought you didn't want to talk about it."

He didn't want to have to talk about it. He didn't want the awkward to come, the awkward that came from sleeping with a CO. He'd done it before, of course— though not CO's like Commander-Fucking-Shepard. The woman bio-punched Atlas' for god's sake. James didn't want the teasing to end. 

Shepard sighed, "Most of these guys," she said, "Most of 'em have known me for years. Knew me when I first became a spectre. Knew me when I spent two years on a slab at Cerberus. Can't tell you how long it took me to get Kaidan to even speak to me."

She turned to him, on the couch— suddenly much closer than he remembered her being. "You knew me at my very worst moment. Stranded, grounded, in prison, on trial for court-marshal. I can only go up with you." 

She put a hand to his chin— half teasing, best friendy that they had been for so long, like she was with Garrus— best duo on the Citadel and between them the best goddamn sniper in the galaxy, and half serious, gentle like the rest of her wasn't. 

Her palm was on his cheek, stubbled from the day, so he turned to kiss into her palm. He didn't know how long they'd live but goddamn if he was gonna waste anymore stupid time letting stupid Joker and stupid Cortez snicker at him from the shadow of his own bunk. 

"I didn't mention it, you know," Shepard said. 

No, he did. 

Shepard kissed down the line of his jaw, firmly settled on his lap. 

James did inwardly sigh, though. This bed looked much less appealing than the one in Shepard's apartment. 


End file.
